Nutrition, Self-Talk and POAPathon
PoolTogether Community Interview #41 CryptoMom
Welcome to the latest PoolTogether Community Interview. We have a special interview today with a fantastic member of the Community - CryptoMom.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words/facts:
A bit about me. I would describe myself as one who refuses to be content with my current level of wisdom. I am constantly striving to learn and expand my knowledge, always curious to discover new ideas and subjects. I had a long career in real estate as a broker and as a lender with years of a passion for health and wellness.
Now I’m happy to have been able to move full time into the health space as an Integrative Health Practitioner and Certified Nutrition Coach. My husband and I have started our company that helps folks all over the world improve their health through nutrition and behavior changes resulting in a sustainable healthy lifestyle. Bringing our health and wellness into the Web3 space will be the next level in our journey.
We love outdoor fitness and activities such as hiking, standup paddle boarding, biking, climbing, and pickleball, yes pickleball!! If you haven’t tried it you must, you too will become addicted. 😎
Tell us about your CryptoMom username?
My oldest son, now 33, played a vital role in introducing me to the world of crypto. When it came time for me to choose a Web3 name, that naturally was my first option. I have heard there are other CryptoMoms out there, I’m not the only one.
Maybe one day I’ll create a CryptoMom group where we can all unite. I’m sure together we will be stronger and can have an impact in Web3! 💪
How long have you been into crypto?
My son began filling my head with crypto knowledge back in 2015 when explaining the basics of Bitcoin to me. It still took me a couple years of research and many chats with him before I truly began to grasp the importance of this virtual currency and the concept of the blockchain.
Do you want to tell us about the main lessons you have learned since then?
The main lesson learned is never jump into a project for fear of missing out (FOMO). Ignore the noise and DYOR, I’ve seen this get too many folks in trouble. If something goes wrong, I find it’s best to take a deep breath and wait until the panic subsides a bit before doing something rash and causing further damage.
What was your best crypto moment?
The crypto journey has been a fun and exciting educational journey, experiencing its ups and downs and evolution over the past years. By joining various discords I’ve had the opportunity to get to know folks in the space, but only online. One of my favorite moments was finally going to my first Web3 related IRL event, Permissionless earlier this year. Such an overload of information!!
The most exciting part was actually meeting folks in person who I only knew by their Web3 name. A real treat was meeting some of the PoolTogether team! Such a great group of genuine folks who are truly making a difference and working so hard to make real changes in the concept of crypto powered savings. 💜
In addition, another great moment was witnessing the Merge live on Sept 15, 2022! Such an epic historical event, witnessing this era of a more sustainable, eco-friendly ETH is yet another milestone in my crypto journey.
And your biggest fail?
My biggest fail was a lesson I learned on the importance of keeping private keys completely offline. I had a very old seed phrase on a password protected cloud storage that was buried under an array of other information. Somehow that document got hacked, presumably by a hacker seeking private keys and mine were discovered.
In no time they entered the wallet popped in some ETH and exited with my tokens. Fortunately, being an early sort of test wallet, this wallet did not contain much, but more importantly was the lesson learned!!
How did you find out about PoolTogether?
Again, my son is the one who introduced PoolTogether to me in September of 2021. After having used other various typical pools and yield farms and learning about and experiencing impermanent loss, I immediately recognized the difference with PoolTogether’s protocol. NO LOSS?! Really? Yes really, so refreshing! I began in the Celo Sponsored V3 Pools and had a fantastic experience.
What made you stick around?
The COMMUNITY! The PoolTogether’s community is unique. So welcoming, friendly and willing to help their members understand and implement saving! I love their option to delegate and saw the generous support of the PoolTogether community during the Ukraine crisis.
The community delegated hundreds of thousands of dollars as well as generous donations. It was such a heartwarming gesture from the PoolTogether community.
How are you involved in the community? Tell us about it.
I’m just a huge supporter of PoolTogether and have fun using their various deposit options on Polygon, Avalanche and Optimism. I’m proud to have been able to take part in the Pooly campaign. To see so many folks come together and show support is a breath of fresh air. Pooly NFTs were a great way to prove how NFTs can have such an impact.
I try to catch every Community Call, subscribe to the newsletter and follow their Twitter to get the latest scoop and updated information. As a bonus Oops’s POAPs are such a treat and fun to collect. Oops does an amazing job each week, it’s always exciting to see his new creations!
Would you recommend PoolTogether to others? How would you describe it to them?
Most definitely! I do recommend PoolTogether to newbies as it’s an easy onboarding process and I don’t need to worry about them losing their funds. It makes for a pleasant first time experience. I don’t know of another platform where this is possible.
Are you involved in any other projects or communities?
You can find me hanging out on POAPathon’s discord. As a core team member, I create the monthly newsletter, assist with tweets, POAPs, the live shows, and general help in the channel. I love that they have recently set up a Health and Fitness channel for members to hop in and chat and set up challenges, etc. I think every DAO should have this channel or something similar where general, mental, physical, and nutritional health can be discussed.
POAPathon is another fantastic community that is comprised of many skilled artists who are commissioned to use their talent to create the many POAPs you’ll find throughout Web3. Most notably the POAP for the recent merge requested by EthStaker, Bankless, ECH, and The Daily Gwei.
I am also involved with a Web3 start-up that will be launching soon. It's been fun watching them grow behind the scenes getting ready to make their debut soon. They are a company that will handle NFT minting and distribution.
Can you please tell us more about POAPathon. What is this and what is the mission here?
POAPathon has a mission to inspire connection, creation, and education. They accomplish this through fun activities, live shows with inspiring guests, an active discord, and bounties provided by requesters that keep many talented artists busy. Requesters come to POAPathon when they are in need of designs such as POAPs, NFTs, infographics, logos, PFPs, pixel art, videos, etc.
A returning requester, the GitPOAP team came to POAPathon to request a POAP for the contributors of the recent merge and offered a $1,000 1st place bounty and a $250 2nd place bounty. The most difficult part of being a requester at POAPathon is when the time comes to choose the winning designs, the competition is incredible and the decisions are never easy.
Which books would you recommend people read? And why?
Generally, all of my reading is nonfiction health and mindset related books, just a few are displayed in the photo.
I rarely read fiction; however, the one book that I recommend the most is a work of fiction titled The Go Giver by Bob Burg. The premise of this quick read is that it offers a set of business success principles that can be applied to everyone, no matter what industry or field of business they are in. These principles can be thought of as a way to increase sales and profits in business or a way to improve relationships and success in life. These five laws of stratospheric success are as follows:
1.The Law of Value “Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.”
2. The Law of Compensation “Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.”
3. The Law of Influence “Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interest first.”
4. The Law of Authenticity “The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.”
5 The Law of Receptivity “The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.”
All of these principles are powerful together. It is a continuous loop, giving equal weight in giving and receiving and can have an exponential positive effect aiding us in becoming our best selves.
What is your philosophy for having success in life?
Life is not about perfection, rather improvement. Failures are a vital part of our learning journey; without failure we can’t progress and grow. Everyone experiences failure at some point, but how one handles it is what makes the difference.
All the greats have had debacled attempts in life, but they didn’t let that prevent them from learning from it, tweaking things and trying again.
As I advise my clients, consistency over intensity, have a positive attitude, be conscious about self-talk, keep self-talk positive, and remember to give as well as be open to receive. 💜
What are some of the first steps people can take to start living more healthily including with better nutrition?
I’ll provide three tips people can do to begin living a healthier lifestyle starting with better nutrition. Tip one is to reduce or better yet, cut out processed foods. If it is packaged in a box and has a barcode along with a list of ingredients, some of which you can’t pronounce, this is an indication that it is processed and something you would want to stay away from. Switching to single ingredient food items, helps control what we consume and is simply better for our bodies.
Tip two involves physical movement. Many folks today are too sedentary, sitting at their computer for hours without moving. Getting daily movement is crucial to our health. There is a study that shows doing a bit of exercise daily at home is more effective than going to the gym and doing long workouts. People will have better results simply fitting in movement, such as resistance training 20 minutes a day vs two-one hour workouts in the gym. The workouts have equivalent total volume, but it turns out the frequency of the shorter workout 5-6 days a week has a better outcome on muscle strength. In addition, I find most people can commit to 20 min 5-6 days a week rather than the longer 1+ hour workouts.
Final tip number three, if everyone just took the time to take a short 15 min walk after each meal, it would vastly improve their health. Walking after meals helps with digestion and greatly reduces the blood glucose levels. Continuous high blood glucose levels are often associated with prediabetes, which eventually may allow one to become diabetic. Prediabetes is a very serious condition According to the CDC approximately 96 million American adults, that’s more than 1 in 3 have prediabetes. Alarmingly, more than 80% of people with prediabetes don’t even know they have it! China, India, Pakistan, and the United States lead the chart with the largest population of diabetics. I feel it is imperative that more folks are aware of these staggering statistics.
Some typical signs of being prediabetic are being overweight, a large waist size, poor diet, inactivity, family history of diabetes, and poor sleep. Once a prediabetic moves to being a Type 2 diabetic more indicative symptoms occur. Our company is developing a program that will address this exact issue.
We provide a community along with an educational method, coaching, and lab testing that will walk folks through the necessary steps to stop diabetes in its tracks. The good news is most prediabetic and type 2 diabetics can take these steps to lower their blood glucose and return their insulin resistance back to normal levels, giving them back their healthy lives.
What do you think has drawn you to Web3 so much? Have a lot of your friends also joined you in exploring Web3?
The funny truth is, none of my friends are in Web3 or even know what it is. Considering the younger generations are more likely than the older ones to be aware of Web3, I feel very isolated concerning Web3 outside of Discord and Twitter. 😂
I believe this fact is also what intrigues me even more to be involved and continue learning about the space. With Web3, boundaries can be broken and people will be able to have more control on the other side. I am determined to be along for the journey and experience the growth of this latest technology. I appreciate the fact that the possibilities are endless.
How can we become more conscious about self-talk and keep this positive?
Whether we realize it or not, all of us have self-talk. When you pay attention to this self-talk you may find that it’s more negative than positive. It’s the thoughts we have about ourselves. For example, you may think “Oh I’m not good enough, “I don’t deserve that”, or “I messed up everything”. These thoughts once started are dangerous. Once they begin, they tend to spiral, and one leads to another. This can leave us depressed, feeling helpless, lonely, and stressed. It can actually decrease an athlete's performance, or one can miss opportunities because of limited thinking.
I’m sure we’ve all heard “If you think you can, or you can’t you are right”. Similarly, “if you think you are, or you aren’t, you are also right.” Trevor Moawad who has been called the “World's Best Brain Trainer” cites “When someone says something out loud, it is 10 times more powerful than when they think it. Interestingly, he pointed out a study done in Georgetown University showed that negativity is 4 to 7 times more powerful than positivity.
When the two are combined you find that saying something negative out loud is 40-70 times more powerful than if you just don’t say anything! You can see why it is important to be conscious of our thoughts and what we say, destroy old negative thought patterns and replace them with new more positive ones.
Positive self-talk involves speaking to yourself in a loving, caring way, such as you would speak to your child or someone you care deeply about. It’s about finding our strengths and things we do well rather than focusing only on our weaknesses, or what we consider we may be lacking. Positive self-talk can improve one's confidence, be motivating, boost performance and reduce anxiety, amongst many other benefits. Starting can be hard, just like implementing a new habit.
Focusing on one area of your life can be a great way to begin. What area would you like to improve, self-love, health, confidence, wellness? Choose just one and focus on it. Examples of positive self-talk for confidence would be “I have the power to change my mind”, I’m proud of myself for the courage it took to do attempt to do this”, I am strong and capable to get through this”, and one of my favorites “I can’t control what other people think, say or do, I can only control me”.
Affirmations are another way to start a positive way of thinking. Using affirmations such as “I feel grateful and happy”, “Today is going to be a great day”, “I am flexible and adaptable”, “My mind is full of brilliant ideas”, “I trust myself to make the right decision”, can make a difference in your day and how your feel about yourself.
Try it, if you catch yourself with negative self-talk, just turn it around and make it positive, see how you feel!
Finally, what are some ways we can start to learn more about the Law of Value and giving more in value than we take in payment.
Going back to my experience in Web3 I suggest the best way to learn about these laws is to practice them. For example, The Law of Value “Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.” Web3 is all about community. I find so many folks are around to contribute for the better of their community. I am inspired by this notion and found that by using this concept I was able to be involved in communities and a start-up in Web3.
This is something that I thought I would never be able to do because I wasn’t a programmer or developer. Web3 is about jumping in, sharing your talent, discovering where you fit in and how to best serve the community. Compare this method to the Web2 world of having to prove yourself first by way of resume or portfolio which then determines your worth of being brought into a company.
If you are reading this chances are you are already part of a DAO or involved in Web3, if not, I challenge those who desire to be involved in a DAO or Web3 to implement this law and I promise you too will find your tribe!
Thank you for reading this week’s PoolTogether Community Interview.
We have the weekly PoolTogether Community Newsletter and the PoolTogether Community Podcast for you to enjoy and learn more about DeFi and Web3. So, please subscribe if you haven’t already.
Please also go to https://pooltogether.com/ to learn how to deposit into the Protocol via Optimism, Polygon or Ethereum as well as connect with us on the PT Discord https://pooltogether.com/discord and Twitter: https://twitter.com/PoolTogether_